I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Sydney Terrorised By Lebanese-Muslim Crime Gangs

For too long our politicians (Australian Labour Party) and
police have turned their backs on a festering problem writes Miranda Devine.

FORGET Clover Moore (Pro Gay/Lesbian Mayor of Sydney who did
cancel the Christmas celebrations that year in the Sydney City) as the Grinch
of Sydney's Christmas.

The "Lions
of Lebanon" with their Glock pistols and Molotov cocktails have put her to
shame this holy season. While the NSW police lock down entire beachfront
suburbs, instruct stores to stop selling baseball bats, and apply the full
force of the law to pasty-faced nerds with a taste for Nazi literature, they
continue to cower from the real hardmen, the Lebanese-Australian (Muslim) criminal
gangs of Sydney's south-west who have ruled the roost in this city for at least
a decade and now number in their thousands.

So when parents and children attending Christmas carols on
Monday night, December 12, at St Joseph the Worker Primary School in South
Auburn were abused and spat on by "young men of Middle Eastern
appearance", there were no police to protect them. Not even when the
sounds of gunshots echoed inside the church, and parked cars were pumped full
of bullets. "Police were called by a number of parents and the principal,
but they were unable to attend because they were needed elsewhere," said
Cardinal George Pell in a statement.

The police were busy that night - Sydney's mini
Kristallnacht "night of the broken glass" - as carloads of men drove
east from Lakemba and Punchbowl to systematically attack whole streets of
parked cars with bats and machetes. Identified by police as being of the
proverbial Middle-Eastern appearance - code for Lebanese Muslim, despite the
fact many are second-generation Australians - they also stabbed a man, smashed
a woman's head with a bat, attacked another woman in a pizza shop and a man who
was putting out his rubbish.

A car smashed by Lebanese-Muslims at Maroubra beach.

They were extracting revenge for the riot the day before on
Cronulla beach when a protest against continuing intimidation of beachgoers by
thugs described as Lebanese turned ugly and drunken racists attacked passers-by
suspected of being "Lebs".

The retaliation
from the gangs of the south-west was a calculated show of strength, with
victims reportedly being asked if they were "Australian" before being
attacked. Over the next 24 hours another three churches in Sydney's south-west
were attacked.

With police unable to guarantee safety, Holy Spirit College
at Lakemba cancelled its carols service. Other schools in the south-west
cancelled concerts and end-of-year presentations or hired security guards.

Thus the lead-up to Christmas this year has been notable
for a rash of cancellations of traditional yuletide activities. The North
Cronulla surf carnival was called off. As was the Bondi Surf Bathers Life
Saving Club's annual Christmas cheer party, and a carols concert expected to
draw 3000 people to Coogee beach.

Rather than a problem of race, religion or
multiculturalism, Sydney is suffering from a longstanding crime problem. It is
a textbook case of how soft policing and lenient magistrates embolden
successive waves of criminals, infecting other people who might otherwise have
been law-abiding.

The roots of the problem can be traced back to Telopea
Street, Punchbowl, in 1998 when a Korean schoolboy, Edward Lee, 14, was stabbed
to death because he went to the wrong house for a birthday party and looked at
the wrong people in the wrong way. He didn't know that a notorious group of
extended Lebanese-Muslim families, descended from the lawless hill tribes of
Northern Lebanon, lived in Telopea Street.

When police arrived they were surrounded and intimidated by
about 100 people. For two years they seemed incapable of solving the crime,
despite at least 20 witnesses.

Lee's mother, Soobin, searching for clues to the death of
her only child, went doorknocking in Telopea Street and the inhabitants laughed
in her face. His father took to sleeping on top of his son's grave and weeping.

Edward Lee murdered by Lebanese
Muslims in Telopera street.

Eventually a youth, who was 15 at the time of the stabbing,
was charged with Lee's killing. In 2003, the youth, who had said "f---ing
Asian deserved it" after the stabbing, was sentenced to a maximum of 10
years in jail. His friend, now-jailed triple murderer Michael Kanaan, received
a three-year sentence for being an accessory after the fact.

But Lee's killing had brought unwanted police attention to
Telopea Street's criminal activities, which included drugs and car rebirthing
rackets. Soon Lakemba police station was attacked with machine-gun fire, death
threats were made to police on their radio network and a police car was shot at
as it travelled down Telopea Street. Kanaan was acquitted this year of the
attack on the police station, which prosecutors said was to teach police a
lesson for "hassling Lebanese people". An alleged accomplice skipped
bail and was arrested in Lebanon on terrorism charges. No one has been brought
to justice over the attack.

The police commissioner of the time, Peter Ryan, talked
tough and did little. Seven years later, the police are still running scared.

Last week,
Channel Seven reported it had obtained a police incident report instructing
police officers to stay away from Punchbowl Park that Monday night, where a
group of men were congregating before heading to Maroubra. The report said
"a direction was given to police about midnight not to enter the area and
antagonise these persons".

The Police Minister, Carl Scully, told reporters he
defended the decision not to confront the group. Superintendent John Richardson
was quoted saying a car crew sent to Punchbowl Park, where 10 cars and 40 men
had gathered, was "ordered to withdraw and observe from afar. There was no
trouble and sending police in would only cause trouble."

Setting the example of an astonishing lack of nerve, the
Premier, Morris Iemma, told Sydneysiders to stay away from the beach for safety
and then cancelled his Christmas media reception which had been scheduled for
last Wednesday night. He appeared in every media appearance like a rabbit
frozen in the spotlight, perhaps frightened of alienating Lebanese Muslims in
his electorate of Lakemba.

That Iemma's electorate is at war with former premier Bob
Carr's former electorate of Maroubra is a handy synchronicity. It highlights
the ALP's long-term culpability in creating the monster that is plaguing the
city, its history of ethnic branch-stacking and "whatever it takes"
tactics to shore up support in the heartland electorates of the south-west, its
policy of spin and cover-up which is at last coming undone.

As one passenger
last week told taxi driver Adrian Neylan, who has chronicled the violence on
his weblog, "the gangs have won". Indeed they have, but the recent
display of official cowardice in the face of the criminal gangs of Sydney's
south-west is just a taste of the way Sydney has been run for a decade.